This volume addresses the emerging area of human computation, The chapters, written by leading international researchers, explore existing and future opportunities to combine the respective strengths of both humans and machines in order to create powerful problem-solving capabilities. The book bridges scientific communities, capturing and integrating the unique perspective and achievements of each. It coalesces contributions from industry and across related disciplines in order to motivate, define, and anticipate the future of this exciting new frontier in science and cultural evolution. Readers can expect to find valuable contributions covering Foundations; Application Domains; Techniques and Modalities; Infrastructure and Architecture; Algorithms; Participation; Analysis; Policy and Security and the Impact of Human Computation. Researchers and professionals will find the Handbook of Human Computation a valuable reference tool. The breadth of content also provides a thorough foundation for students of the field.

What was the cause of Donald Trump's stunning victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Was it the peculiarities of the electoral college? Voter resistance to three-term rule by a single party? Anxiety about illegal immigration? As Niall Ferguson explains in The Square and the Tower, the answer lies largely in one word: networks.

With his work on computer logic, John H Holland became one of the most important founders of modern computer science. People who knew John H Holland were all amazed and deeply influenced by his incredibly imaginative and creative mind. He produced many more ideas than he could follow up in his life time. This selection of his papers in the field of computer logic entails many of his explored and unexplored ideas. Revisiting the explored ideas and exploring the unexplored ones should be of great interest to scientists of all ages, and of great value to the current research not only in computer science but in many other fields as well.

From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture.

The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it.

This book provides a comprehensive overview on emergent bursty patterns in the dynamics of human behaviour. It presents common and alternative understanding of the investigated phenomena, and points out open questions worthy of further investigations.The book is structured as follows. In the introduction the authors discuss the motivation of the field, describe bursty phenomena in case of human behaviour, and relate it to other disciplines. The second chapter addresses the measures commonly used to characterise heterogeneous signals, bursty human dynamics, temporal paths, and correlated behaviour. These definitions are first introduced to set the basis for the discussion of the third chapter about the observations of bursty human patterns in the dynamics of individuals, dyadic interactions, and collective behaviour. The subsequent fourth chapter discusses the models of bursty human dynamics. Various mechanisms have been proposed about the source of the heterogeneities in human dynamics, which leads to the introduction of conceptually different modelling approaches. The authors address all of these perspectives objectively, highlight their strengths and shortcomings, and mention possible extensions to them. The fifth chapter addresses the effect of individual heterogeneous behaviour on collective dynamics. This question in particular has been investigated in various systems including spreading phenomena, random walks, and opinion formation dynamics. Here the main issues are whether burstiness speeds up or slows down the co-evolving processes, and how burstiness modifies time-dependent paths in the system that determine the spreading patterns of any kind of information or influence. Finally in the sixth chapter the authors end the review with a discussion and future perspectives.It is an ideal book for researchers and students who wish to enter the field of bursty human dynamics or want to expand their knowledge on such phenomena.

How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle?

What sort of future do you want? This book empowers you to join what may be the most important conversation of our time. It doesn’t shy away from the full range of viewpoints or from the most controversial issues—from superintelligence to meaning, consciousness and the ultimate physical limits on life in the cosmos.

This book provides an outline of theoretical concepts and their experimental verification in studies of self-organization phenomena in chemical systems, as they emerged in the mid-20th century and have evolved since. Presenting essays on selected topics, it was prepared by authors who have made profound contributions to the field.

Traditionally, physical chemistry has been concerned with interactions between atoms and molecules that produce a variety of equilibrium structures - or the 'dead' order - in a stationary state. But biological cells exhibit a different 'living' kind of order, prompting E. Schrödinger to pose his famous question “What is life?” in 1943. Through an unprecedented theoretical and experimental development, it was later revealed that biological self-organization phenomena are in complete agreement with the laws of physics, once they are applied to a special class of thermodynamically open systems and non-equilibrium states. This knowledge has in turn led to the design and synthesis of simple inorganic systems capable of self-organization effects. These artificial 'living organisms' are able to operate on macroscopic to microscopic scales, even down to single-molecule machines.

In the future, such research could provide a basis for a technological breakthrough, comparable in its impact with the invention of lasers and semiconductors. Its results can be used to control natural chemical processes, and to design artificial complex chemical processes with various functionalities. The book offers an extensive discussion of the history of research on complex chemical systems and its future prospects.

Waste is material information. Landfills are detailed records of everyday consumption and behavior; much of what we know about the distant past we know from discarded objects unearthed by archaeologists and interpreted by historians. And yet the systems and infrastructures that process our waste often remain opaque. In this book, Dietmar Offenhuber examines waste from the perspective of information, considering emerging practices and technologies for making waste systems legible and how the resulting datasets and visualizations shape infrastructure governance. He does so by looking at three waste tracking and participatory sensing projects in Seattle, São Paulo, and Boston.

Offenhuber expands the notion of urban legibility—the idea that the city can be read like a text—to introduce the concept of infrastructure legibility. He argues that infrastructure governance is enacted through representations of the infrastructural system, and that these representations stem from the different stakeholders’ interests, which drive their efforts to make the system legible. The Trash Track project in Seattle used sensor technology to map discarded items through the waste and recycling systems; the Forager project looked at the informal organization processes of waste pickers working for Brazilian recycling cooperatives; and mobile systems designed by the city of Boston allowed residents to report such infrastructure failures as potholes and garbage spills. Through these case studies, Offenhuber outlines an emerging paradigm of infrastructure governance based on acomplex negotiation among users, technology, and the city.

In his ambitious book Life Through Time and Space, Wallace Arthur tack­les an extraordinarily difficult set of topics. What is the origin and fate of the universe? How did life, and eventually intelligent life, come into existence on Earth? How does a fertilized human egg trans­form into a complex person with only DNA to guide development?

A dog owner weighs twice as much as her German shepherd. Does she eat twice as much? Does a big city need twice as many gas stations as one that is half its size? Our first instinct is to say yes. But, alas, we are wrong. On a per-gram basis, a human requires about 25% less food than her dog, and the larger city needs only 85% more gas stations. As Geoffrey West explains in Scale, the reason behind these intriguing phenomena is a universal law known as allometry—the finding that as organisms, cities, and com­panies grow, many of their characteristics scale nonlinearly.

This book is concerned with the various aspects of hierarchical collective behaviour which is manifested by most complex systems in nature. From the many of the possible topics, we plan to present a selection of those that we think are useful from the point of shedding light from very different directions onto our quite general subject. Our intention is to both present the essential contributions by the existing approaches as well as go significantly beyond the results obtained by traditional methods by applying a more quantitative approach then the common ones (there are many books on qualitative interpretations). In addition to considering hierarchy in systems made of similar kinds of units, we shall concentrate on problems involving either dominance relations or the process of collective decision-making from various viewpoints.

Why we live in hierarchies: a quantitative treatiseAnna Zafeiris, Tamás Vicsek

No matter how old you are, there’s a good chance that the word “popular” immediately transports you back to your teenage years. Most of us can easily recall the adolescent social cliques, the high school pecking order, and which of our peers stood out as the most or the least popular teens we knew. Even as adults we all still remember exactly where we stood in the high school social hierarchy, and the powerful emotions associated with our status persist decades later. This may be for good reason.

Popular examines why popularity plays such a key role in our development and, ultimately, how it still influences our happiness and success today. In many ways—some even beyond our conscious awareness—those old dynamics of our youth continue to play out in every business meeting, every social gathering, in our personal relationships, and even how we raise our children. Our popularity even affects our DNA, our health, and our mortality in fascinating ways we never previously realized. More than childhood intelligence, family background, or prior psychological issues, research indicates that it’s how popular we were in our early years that predicts how successful and how happy we grow up to be.

But it’s not always the conventionally popular people who fare the best, for the simple reason that there is more than one type of popularity—and many of us still long for the wrong one. As children, we strive to be likable, which can offer real benefits not only on the playground but throughout our lives. In adolescence, though, a new form of popularity emerges, and we suddenly begin to care about status, power, influence, and notoriety—research indicates that this type of popularity hurts us more than we realize.Popular relies on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience to help us make the wisest choices for ourselves and for our children, so we may all pursue more meaningful, satisfying, and rewarding relationships.

In this follow-up to his hugely popular The Book of Trees and Visual Complexity, Manuel Lima takes us on a lively tour through millennia of circular information design. Three hundred detailed and colorful illustrations from around the world cover an encyclopedic array of subjects--architecture, urban planning, fine art, design, fashion, technology, religion, cartography, biology, astronomy, and physics, all based on the circle, the universal symbol of unity, perfection, movement, and infinity.

The Book of Circles juxtaposes clay trading tokens used by the ancient Sumerians with the iconic logos of twentieth-century corporations, a chart organizing seven hundred Nintendo offerings with a Victorian board game based on the travels of Nellie Bly, and a visual analysis of Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining with early celestial charts that placed the earth at the center of the universe, among a wealth of other elegant and intriguing methods for displaying information.

Lima provides an authoritative history of the circle as well as a unique taxonomy of twenty-one varieties of circle diagrams, rounding out this visual feast for infographics enthusiasts.

This book aims to bring together researchers and practitioners working across domains and research disciplines to measure, model, and visualize complex networks. It collects the works presented at the 9th International Conference on Complex Networks (CompleNet) 2018 in Boston, MA in March, 2018. With roots in physical, information and social science, the study of complex networks provides a formal set of mathematical methods, computational tools and theories to describe prescribe and predict dynamics and behaviors of complex systems. Despite their diversity, whether the systems are made up of physical, technological, informational, or social networks, they share many common organizing principles and thus can be studied with similar approaches. This book provides a view of the state-of-the-art in this dynamic field and covers topics such as group decision-making, brain and cellular connectivity, network controllability and resiliency, online activism, recommendation systems, and cyber security.

Although complexity surrounds us, its inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradiction can at first make complex systems appear inscrutable. Ecosystems, for instance, are nonlinear, self-organizing, seemingly chaotic structures in which individuals interact both with each other and with the myriad biotic and abiotic components of their surroundings across geographies as well as spatial and temporal scales. In the face of such complexity, ecologists have long sought tools to streamline and aggregate information. Among them, in the 1980s, T. F. H. Allen and Thomas B. Starr implemented a burgeoning concept from business administration: hierarchy theory. Cutting-edge when Hierarchy was first published, their approach to unraveling complexity is now integrated into mainstream ecological thought.

This thoroughly revised and expanded second edition of Hierarchy reflects the assimilation of hierarchy theory into ecological research, its successful application to the understanding of complex systems, and the many developments in thought since. Because hierarchies and levels are habitual parts of human thinking, hierarchy theory has proven to be the most intuitive and tractable vehicle for addressing complexity. By allowing researchers to look explicitly at only the entities and interconnections that are relevant to a specific research question, hierarchically informed data analysis has enabled a revolution in ecological understanding. With this new edition of Hierarchy, that revolution continues.

In the world's top research labs and universities, the race is on to invent the ultimate learning algorithm: one capable of discovering any knowledge from data, and doing anything we want, before we even ask. In The Master Algorithm, Pedro Domingos lifts the veil to give us a peek inside the learning machines that power Google, Amazon, and your smartphone. He assembles a blueprint for the future universal learner-the Master Algorithm-and discusses what it will mean for business, science, and society.

This book uncovers mathematical structures underlying natural intelligence and applies category theory as a modeling language for understanding human cognition, giving readers new insights into the nature of human thought. In this context, the book explores various topics and questions, such as the human representation of the number system, why our counting ability is different from that which is evident among non-human organisms, and why the idea of zero is so difficult to grasp.The book is organized into three parts: the first introduces the general reason for studying general structures underlying the human mind; the second part introduces category theory as a modeling language and use it for exposing the deep and fascinating structures underlying human cognition; and the third applies the general principles and ideas of the first two parts to reaching a better understanding of challenging aspects of the human mind such as our understanding of the number system, the metaphorical nature of our thinking and the logic of our unconscious dynamics.

In their second collaboration, biographers Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman present the story of Claude Shannon—one of the foremost intellects of the twentieth century and the architect of the Information Age, whose insights stand behind every computer built, email sent, video streamed, and webpage loaded. Claude Shannon was a groundbreaking polymath, a brilliant tinkerer, and a digital pioneer. He constructed the first wearable computer, outfoxed Vegas casinos, and built juggling robots. He also wrote the seminal text of the digital revolution, which has been called “the Magna Carta of the Information Age.” In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Soni and Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. With unique access to Shannon’s family and friends, A Mind at Play brings this singular innovator and always playful genius to life.

The essence of this book can be found in a line written by the ancient Roman Stoic Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca: "Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid". This sentence summarizes the features of the phenomenon that we call "collapse," which is typically sudden and often unexpected, like the proverbial "house of cards." But why are such collapses so common, and what generates them? Several books have been published on the subject, including the well known "Collapse" by Jared Diamond (2005), "The collapse of complex societies" by Joseph Tainter (1998) and "The Tipping Point," by Malcom Gladwell (2000). Why The Seneca Effect? This book is an ambitious attempt to pull these various strands together by describing collapse from a multi-disciplinary viewpoint. The reader will discover how collapse is a collective phenomenon that occurs in what we call today "complex systems," with a special emphasis on system dynamics and the concept of "feedback." From this foundation, Bardi applies the theory to real-world systems, from the mechanics of fracture and the collapse of large structures to financial collapses, famines and population collapses, the fall of entire civilzations, and the most dreadful collapse we can imagine: that of the planetary ecosystem generated by overexploitation and climate change. The final objective of the book is to describe a conclusion that the ancient stoic philosophers had already discovered long ago, but that modern system science has rediscovered today. If you want to avoid collapse you need to embrace change, not fight it. Neither a book about doom and gloom nor a cornucopianist's dream, The Seneca Effect goes to the heart of the challenges that we are facing today, helping us to manage our future rather than be managed by it.

This book covers recent developments in epidemic process models and related data on temporally varying networks. It is widely recognized that contact networks are indispensable for describing, understanding, and intervening to stop the spread of infectious diseases in human and animal populations; “network epidemiology” is an umbrella term to describe this research field.

More recently, contact networks have been recognized as being highly dynamic. This observation, also supported by an increasing amount of new data, has led to research on temporal networks, a rapidly growing area. Changes in network structure are often informed by epidemic (or other) dynamics, in which case they are referred to as adaptive networks.

This volume gathers contributions by prominent authors working in temporal and adaptive network epidemiology, a field essential to understanding infectious diseases in real society.

This volume is the proceedings of ECAL 2017, the Fourteenth European Conference on Artificial Life, held September 4–8th 2017, in Lyon, France (https://project.inria.fr/ecal2017/). Since the first ECAL in 1991, the conference is the main international event of the International Society for Artificial Life in odd-numbered years, alternating with ALife, the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. The theme of this edition of ECAL was "Create, play, experiment, discover: The experimental power of virtual worlds". The volume contains the abstracts of the seven invited presentations, as well as 87 contributed articles selected by the programme committee based on at least three independent reviews. Contributions are either long (up to 8 pages) or short (up to 2 pages) articles. Long articles present original results, while short articles are extended abstracts presenting either original work or recently published work. These contributions cover all the topics of artificial life, including: artificial chemistry; origins of life; self-replication, self-repair and morphogenesis; evolutionary dynamics; ecological dynamics; social dynamics; computational cellular biology; computational physiology; bio-inspired robotics; evolutionary robotics; perception, cognition and behavior; evolution of language and computational linguistics; embodied and interactive systems; collective dynamics of swarms; complex dynamical systems and networks; cellular automata and discrete dynamical systems; economic and social systems as living systems; computational humanities; methodologies and tools for artificial life; interactions between in silico/in vitro/in vivo experiments; philosophical, epistemological and ethical issues; artificial life and education; artificial life-based art; applications of artificial life; living technologies.

The main topic of Dennett’s book is intelligent design and the design of intelligence, trying to make intuitive the processes of both, be it the top-down process of comprehension that designs with foresight and reasons or the bottom-up process of evolution that has, through blind trial and error, captured free-floating rationales and ultimately, through co-evolution (between memes and genes), achieved top-down intelligence, flipping its original design process upside down.

The Money Formula takes you inside the engine room of the global economy to explore the little-understood world of quantitative finance, and show how the future of our economy rests on the backs of this all-but-impenetrable industry. Written not from a post-crisis perspective – but from a preventative point of view – this book traces the development of financial derivatives from bonds to credit default swaps, and shows how mathematical formulas went beyond pricing to expand their use to the point where they dwarfed the real economy. You'll learn how the deadly allure of their ice-cold beauty has misled generations of economists and investors, and how continued reliance on these formulas can either assist future economic development, or send the global economy into the financial equivalent of a cardiac arrest.

Rather than rehash tales of post-crisis fallout, this book focuses on preventing the next one. Even amidst global recovery, the financial system still has the potential to seize up at any moment. The Money Formula explores the how and why of financial disaster, what must happen to prevent the next one.

There are more than thirty thousand species of fish―more than mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. But for all their breathtaking diversity and beauty, we rarely consider how fish think, feel, and behave. In What a Fish Knows, the ethologist Jonathan Balcombe takes us under the sea and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal what fishes can do, how they do it, and why. Introducing the latest revelations in animal behavior and biology, Balcombe upends our assumptions about fish, exposing them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed creatures but as sentient, aware, social―even Machiavellian. They conduct elaborate courtship rituals and develop lifelong bonds with shoal-mates. They also plan, hunt cooperatively, use tools, punish wrongdoers, curry favor, and deceive one another. Fish possess sophisticated senses that rival our own. The reef-dwelling damselfish identifies its brethren by face patterns visible only in ultraviolet light, and some species communicate among themselves in murky waters using electric signals. Highlighting these breakthrough discoveries and others from his own encounters with fish, Balcombe inspires a more enlightened appraisal of marine life.

An illuminating journey into the world of underwater science, What a Fish Knows will forever change your view of our aquatic cousins.

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